Life after Lennon

Page Tools

Many young people cannot identify a picture of the most
famous and cynical Beatle. Sean O'Hagan reassesses the legacy of
the world's first modern pop star.

ON THE western edge of New York's Central Park, a sun-dappled
mosaic circle on the ground contains the single word
"Imagine". This is the still, calm centre of Strawberry
Fields, a renamed corner of the park that has become a mecca for
the curious and the faithful who come daily to remember John
Lennon, the city's most famous adopted son.

Today, like every day for the past 14 years, the
"Imagine" site is tended by a native New Yorker called
Gary, a 41-year-old self-appointed keeper of the Lennon flame in
ragged ponytail, baggy shorts and faded Led Zeppelin T-shirt.

"John came to me in my sleep and told me to do it," he says,
when I ask why he has covered the circle with petals.

"I do it every day, man. I've done it with rose petals and
leaves. I've done it with pumpkin seeds and pine kernels. One time,
when I couldn't get no flowers in the winter, I covered it with
bagels and green bananas.

I think," he says, without irony, "that John would have liked
that."

It is almost 25 years since Lennon was shot dead in front of his
wife Yoko by Mark Chapman, a deranged fan, on the doorstep of the
nearby Dakota building where he lived.

It happened on the night of December 8, 1980, shocking the world
and provoking scenes of silent, numb grieving among the New Yorkers
who had taken Lennon - the toughest, mouthiest, most cynical, and
therefore the most New York Beatle - to their bosom when he was
finally granted full residency after a long legal battle with US
immigration.

As Chapman nears the end of his prison term (he was sentenced to
life but has so far made three unsuccessful parole requests since
becoming eligible in 2000) Lennon fans in New York have not
forgiven him for his senseless slaying of the man who wrote and
sang the two most enduring odes to pacifism and eternal optimism;
Give Peace A Chance and Imagine, the latter
having now attained the currency of a humanist hymn. "Chapman would
not last a week on the streets of New York," a hotel barman told
me. Better he stay inside, he said.

At the "Imagine" shrine, Lennon pilgrims of every age
queue to have their picture taken beside Gary's ongoing artwork. I
ask two model-thin teenage girls what Lennon means to them. They
look bemused. "He was the first pop singer who got shot, right?"
says one. "He was in the Beatles!" says her friend, "we learnt
about them in school."

Do they listen to Beatles music? "Um, not really," says the
taller of the two.

It seems that the legend of the Beatles may finally be fading.
In a recent survey by OMM, The Observer's music magazine,
56 per cent of the music-mad 16-to-24-year-olds polled could not
put a name to a photograph of Lennon. Perhaps, as the baby boomer
generation slips into late middle age, his iconic status, too, is
under threat.

And yet, three years ago, Lennon was the only musician to make
it into the Top 10 Greatest Britons voted for by BBC viewers,
taking his place alongside Churchill, Darwin and Shakespeare. And
back in 1999 Imagine was voted the nation's favourite pop
lyric in another BBC poll.

As the 25th anniversary of his death approaches, Lennon is
destined once again to be feted as arguably the greatest rock star
of them all. His commercial resurrection is already under way on
Broadway, where a multimillion-dollar musical, called simply
Lennon, has just opened with the blessing of Yoko Ono. If it
signals Lennon's late commodification by the showbiz mainstream, it
shows too, in its ham-fisted way, how Lennon and his songs defy
this kind of reductionism.

"He's too big for that kind of treatment," as Paul McCartney
succinctly put it recently.

Among today's pop stars, Lennon remains one of the touchstones
of greatness, both as a songwriter and social commentator. U2's
Bono, lead singer of the biggest pop group since the Beatles, and
one of the few contemporary rock stars to run with Lennon's notion
of the rock lyric as slogan, as a catalyst for capturing, then
igniting, the public consciousness, acknowledges him as his prime
influence.

What Bono admires most is "that daring-to-fail courage that
often backfired. Even though he had a mouth full of spite and
spleen, he always had a deep vulnerability and a huge heart. He was
a true artist in so far as he wasn't afraid to fail."

It was the mouth full of spite and spleen, though, that
undoubtedly led Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis to worship Lennon
above all others, Liam once claiming that "John Lennon and Johnny
Rotten were the only two that mattered in rock'n'roll".

It seems then that, even as he is fading into folk memory like
Elvis before him, Lennon lives on, too, though in a different,
perhaps more meaningful, way.

Despite the ubiquity of his most softcore and impossibly utopian
ditty Imagine, despite the mainstream's collective memory of the
Beatles as the ultimate epitome of Swinging Sixties fabness and
despite the happy-clappy inanity of Lennon the musical, there is
something about the least-loveable Beatle that resists our attempts
to posthumously canonise him, something to do with that
never-quite-abandoned abrasiveness and unpredictability.

Lennon's anger was undoubtedly class-based, a working-class
northerner's response to the stultifying conservatism that held
sway in the '50s and early '60s.

His mother's death, in 1958, left the teenage Lennon traumatised
to the point where he never spoke of it, though his anger at the
world was increasingly vented against those he perceived as weaker
and more vulnerable than himself.

Though he would later cloak that anger in an often cynical sense
of humour and a gift for surrealist word play, Lennon was easily
the most volatile British pop star, at least until that other John
- Lydon aka Rotten.

Lennon also possessed in the early '60s the first credible white
rock'n'roll voice - what the late Beatles historian Ian MacDonald
memorably described as "that brassy northern roar, flecked with
bluesy moans".

"In a very real way, Lennon was the first modern pop star,"
elaborates the music writer and historian of punk, Jon Savage.

While the Beatles are generally accepted as the greatest pop
group, Savage sees their importance as much more than simply
musical. "Put simply, the Beatles didn't just change pop music,
they changed everything."

It has been 35 years since the Beatles' great adventure ended
not with a bang but a protracted whimper, their messy and
protracted break-up signalling the death knell for all they stood
for.

In short, the Beatles were pop in excelsis: young, innocent and
cool, then brilliantly, beautifully ambitious, every record a leap
of faith and experimentation, waited for with bated breath by an
audience that grew with them and came to expect nothing more than
inspired pop perfection.

Because of that, Lennon was the first rock star to grapple with
the often emasculating contradictions of the job: the tricky
tightrope walk between celebrity and street cred; the conundrum of
how to sing with conviction about rebellion and injustice while
inured to both by a lavish and indulgent lifestyle.

The political Lennon did his best, and more than most, to
straddle the contradictions of his celebrity. In the early Beatles
days he was a natural iconoclast and rebel. In nearly every bit of
early footage of the group playing live, Lennon is the one
undercutting the established performing ritual, mugging for the
cameras, pulling silly faces and acting the monkey between
songs.

Though they were all natural wits, Lennon was easily the
edgiest, most unpredictable Beatle; the one, as MacDonald puts it,
"who first knocked the door of propriety off its hinges". It was
Lennon who famously quipped during a royal variety gig "Will all
the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? The rest of you
just rattle your jewellery."

It was Lennon who sent back his MBE. And Lennon who, at the
height of Beatlemania, offered in interview the offending words,
"We're more popular than Jesus now".

LENNON had begun retreating from the Beatles - or, at least,
their confining celebrity - at the very height of their popularity.
In the mid-'60s, after the group had stopped touring to concentrate
on their ground-breaking studio performances, he would retreat

to the big house he shared with his first wife, Cynthia, and
their young son, Julian. There, he existed in a state of protracted
domestic enervation, either staring out of the window in a stoned
haze or playing with the expensive gadgets that littered every
room.

"John's record for not speaking, just doing nothing and not
communicating to anyone is three days," wrote the Beatles' first
biographer, Hunter Davis, in 1968. His mental state was fragile
going on psychotic, and for a while he thought himself the
reincarnation of Jesus. Yoko, as he constantly reminded the world
when it blamed her for the break-up of the Beatles and his
marriage, saved his life.

Yoko, as MacDonald notes, "pulled John out of self-absorption,
introduced him to political art". They famously spent their
seven-day honeymoon in bed for world peace, while the world's media
beat a path to their Amsterdam hotel room, mistakenly believing
they were going to make love on camera.

In the early '70s Lennon embraced a more confrontational and
contradictory radicalism. The period produced some of his finest
post-Beatles songs, including the anthemic Power to the People and
the incendiary Attica State, but led to some ill-advised liaisons
with the more extreme end of late-'60s-early-'70s activism, notably
the Black Panthers and the Yippies. He even turned up,

with Yoko in tow, at a "Troops Out of Ireland" anti-internment
rally in London in August 1971, where he held up a placard that
read, "Victory to the IRA Against British Imperialism". This just a
few months before Imagine was released.

The cruellest irony of his sudden and brutal death was that it
occurred at a pivotal moment when Lennon seemed finally to be
making peace with the world and, more pertinently, with
himself.

"He was calmer and more focused than I had ever seen him," says
photographer Bob Gruen, who befriended Lennon in what were to
become his final years in New York.

"His whole thrust in life was towards the notion of family. That
was the message he was about to take to the world - that after all
the questing for the big answers he had found real peace and love
at home."

Perhaps it's time we remembered Lennon for what he really was:
not just the first and greatest pop star but also the most
vulnerable and messed up. The upstart who stole the world and
tried, in his impulsively tough and compulsively tender way, to
make sense of it. And, most courageous of all, to change it.